Spying

More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.

Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

That’s not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. He’s interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies — and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.

Thinking Americans with skills and kids, please get out of this Post-Constitutional, post-functional, Dystopian State of Ameristan while you still can: the window is closing on that opportunity exponentially by the day.

Privacy advocates are duly freaked out. “All the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life—a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States,” the ACLU’s Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump wrote in a report released earlier this year (PDF). A long tradition of government inaction in response to the privacy threats unleashed by new technologies does not auger well for Americans’ expectations of privacy.

Drones may be so intrusive that M. Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics for the Center for Internet and Society, thinks they might finally shake Americans out of their complacency about the relentless attacks on their privacy in the decade after 9/11.

A new feature story in this month’s Wired blows the lid off plans for a massive new National Security Agency data center in Utah that represents the resurrection of a program that Congress killed in 2003, known as “Total Information Awareness,” targeting literally all electronic communications all over the world — including those made by American citizens.